On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 9:10 PM, Hassan
Schroeder<hassan.schroeder / gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Garry Freemyer<garryfre / pacbell.net> wrote:
>
>> With ruby, its all called ruby and it's not so confusing, but if I saw a set of programs under conglomerates Ruby and Ruby2, I would be left wondering what version of which I should get for a particular purpose.
>
> Would you? And so you wouldn't put any effort into learning what
> those differences were?
>
> So you could make an informed choice?
>
> Up to you, obviously. Best of luck. :-)
>
Well, I think I'll try and inject some help into this mounting flame
war. It's sometimes best to go to the source to figure this stuff
out. In this case, since Sun doesn't release sdks for Macs, you'll
need to do a little research (but not too much). Previously, to get
a jdk compatible with 1.6 proper on mac os X 10.5, you'd have to do
some hacking around. Here are some helpful links:
Historical: http://blog.adsdevshop.com/2008/02/26/installing-the-jdk-16-on-mac-os-x/
Recent information:
http://support.apple.com/downloads/Java_for_Mac_OS_X_10_5_Update_4
And to add my two cents to this IDE discussion, I think a person new
to the Ruby language should consider using a text editor like emacs/vi
at first and then see what other things are out there. Personally, I
prefer using Eclipse or Netbeans on *nix and have used some really
nice commercial plug-ins with Visual Studio on widows that are also
pretty great, taking full advantage of intellisense.
It's important to use something like emacs or vi at first because it
gives you an idea of what could be improved upon (and emacs is super
customizable; there are some great tutorials on setting it up for Ruby
developmen,t totally worth researching). As you become more
proficient and become involved in software development projects that
encompass many developers, you might see more IDEs or more powerful
editors in use (depending on the company you're working for).
There are lots of reasons for this many of which have to do with
adding unit test coverage, supporting development environments, etc.
that you can obviously do very easily in many different tools (which
is great about software development in general), but IDEs can make
this a one stop shop where you can do all these things which is very
appealing to developers when working on a large software project.
p.s. regarding java versioning, you should look at this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history
Good luck!